The year of the mural — but galleries lost — in Edmonton's art scene

On a pleasant Saturday night last September, rivers of glowing grocery-store products in the form of lanterns flowed in multiple directions from the downtown core — a happening of weird beauty that surprised bar patrons rushing to the giveaway source, laughing.

The finale event of the two-night Petite Nuit art event, Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky’s Northern Lights Mini-Mart was a luminescent greenhouse in the dark, a see-through store filled with 2,000 familiar items like Crest toothpaste and Campbell’s soup. Except these were perfect handmade facsimiles of the products, illuminated from inside with tiny LED lights. People lined up and were allowed to choose just one thing as a timer ran down — then walk home with a ghostly lantern of, say, Old Dutch BBQ potato chips.

The comment on commercialism, scarcity and even false gods was easy to pick up — even the value of art itself. Warhol would be proud.

The mini version of the massively successful Nuit Blanche festival (which saw 50,000 people downtown in 2015) was its own minor hit. Whether city council comes around to funding a full-scale version in 2017, it was an easy highlight of a tumultuous year in Edmonton art.

Some galleries were extremely inventive, sometimes changing their physical spaces, including a set of museum shelves at SNAP, Tammy Salzl’s curtained-off dollhouse at dc3 Art Projects and Peter Robertson Robertson turning its space into a reflective pool for Steve Driscoll’s show And a Dark Wind Blows. AT Latitude 53, Lee Henderson’s installation Palliative Care, a video of every mention of death and dying over the entire run of The Golden Girls, was clever and mesmerizing, just one of many smart shows this year.

But the city lost a number of gallery and artist spaces outright — including the Drawing Room, Ficus, the Creative Practices Institute house and, on 124 Street, Daffodil Gallery and the 50-year veteran Douglas Udell Gallery.

Kristy Trinier was a curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta.Bruce Edwards /
Postmedia file

Kristy Trinier departed for an arts director job at the Banff Centre. In her whirlwind activity here, she wrote the Edmonton Arts Council’s Public Art Master Plan and oversaw our first, game-changing flood of new landmarks as EAC’s public art director. Then, as curator at Art Gallery of Alberta, she dug bravely into our wealth of local artists, including curating two biennials and helping spark the Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective, supporting indigenous artists.

A loss for us, but this year the arts council gained its impressive new executive director Sanjay Shahani, who started working on a new master plan for the organization before he even started in July.

Alex Janvier’s tsa tsa ke k’e at Rogers Place.Larry Wong /
Postmedia

As far as public art went, Edmonton won perhaps its most significant piece in modern history in Alex Janvier’s tsa tsa ke k’e — Iron Foot Place — in the new downtown arena, an inspiration to anyone who crosses that colourful maze of dark lines and hidden symbols in the tiles. Outside, realities:united’s Essential Tree is an impressive demonstration of geometric volume, while to the northeast, a five-mural portrait piece called Pillars of the Community reminded us that public art can sometimes be a front line, as a giant painting of a person incarcerated for violent crime was quickly replaced with a less controversial face.

Over in the Quarters, Brandon Vickerd’s brilliant humanoid bronzes with taxidermy elements were moved a block away from a displeased local restaurant. And a mural containing an owl by AJA Louden and Evan Brunt was whitewashed entirely from the side of iHuman.

That piece was part of Rust Magic Street Mural Festival, which transformed walls on both sides of the river into serious works of art by artists local and global, a total of 13. This project was beautiful, transformative, with more coming next year.

If anything can be said of 2016, it was Edmonton’s year of the mural, including Make Something Edmonton’s giant sign facing city hall which gave the city a new slogan — often used ironically: “Take a risk. It’s the most Edmonton thing you can do.” Is it now?

L.A. painter Cleon Peterson in front of his untitled mural on the side of El Cortez.Fish Griwkowsky

But if the north side can boast of Janvier’s piece, Old Strathcona’s new crown jewel is the 24-metre piece on the side of El Cortez and Have Mercy by Cleon Peterson, combative figures struggling to survive. That one feels a bit more like home. Right after doing it, the internationally renowned Peterson went on to create a giant piece under the Eiffel Tower, for their Nuit Blanche. May we stay in the family.

The highlight looking forward? The Indigenous Art Park — the departing Trinier also sparked this project, incidentally — will be fully in place by 2018, a testament to the endurance of amiskwaciwâskahikan, the Cree word for the place we call home.

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